To achieve higher crawl rates when using Crawlera with Scrapy, it’s recommended to disable the Auto Throttle addon and increase the maximum number of concurrent requests. You may also want to increase the download timeout. Here is a list of settings that achieve that purpose:

NOTE: You can override Crawlera settings from your settings.py file by adding them to Scrapy Cloud project/spider settings (normally, settings entered in Scrapy Cloud UI take precedence over settings entered in the spider, but not in the case of using custom Docker images -- UI settings will be ignored).